Introducing the “Permissive 3000” license

Software licenses aren’t necessarily the easiest texts to understand. This issue is compounded when the person trying to understand the license is in a different jurisdiction or is a non-native speaker of English. A recent thread on the OSI’s license-discuss list brought this issue to light. According to the original poster, a project using the BSD 3-Clause license was used without attribution in a proprietary product. The developer lost the court case because the judge did not understand English well. The poster brought an attempt at a rewrite to the list, but it had some contradictions and other meaningful differences. So I thought I’d give it a try myself.

This weekend, I started from the original BSD 3-Clause license and excised all of the words not on the Oxford 3000™ word list (or reasonably close modifications, e.g. verb tense conjugations). I did make an exception for the word “copyright”, since it seems indispensable to a software license. In all other cases, I used synonyms and circumlocution in order to preserve the meaning while remaining within the constrained word list. This was challenging at times, since circumlocution can end up making the document more difficult to understand than an unknown word might. The difficulty is further compounded by the fact that many words have a distinct legal meaning and a synonym might not have the same weight.

I consoled myself with the fact that software warranties (where most of the real challenge was) are probably not that useful anyway. Furthermore, just because a word has a distinct meaning in American courts, that doesn’t mean that foreign legal systems have the same definitions. Trying to use largely U.S.-centric licenses written in English is a challenge for a global society, but I don’t know that a system of jurisdiction/language-specific licenses would be any better.

In any case, without further ado, I present the Permissive 3000 license. It’s highly experimental and totally unvetted by legal professionals, so nobody should use it for anything except a learning exercise. I’m looking forward to some constructive feedback and hopefully it sparks a discussion about how licenses can be simplified so that they’re more easily understood by judges, developers, and users alike.